Arbiters of faith, agents of empire: Spanish inquisitors and their careers, 1550--1650

Although infamous as symbols of abusive legal power and narrow-minded orthodoxy, the individual careers of Spain's inquisitors have received little study. This dissertation aims, then, to analyze the mental landscape of five such judges of the Spanish Inquisition. It explores the intersections between crown service, personal ambition, religious reform, and legal maneuvering in the writings and judicial actions of five Spanish inquisitors who lived between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. The examination of these inquisitors on an individual level, I argue, forces us to rethink the relationship between the history of the Inquisition, the administration of the Spanish empire, and the processes of Catholic reform in early modern Europe. In this investigation, I consulted early modern manuscript and print sources in numerous archives in Spain and Mexico, as well as in the British Library in London.; As imperial agents, inquisitors promoted the policies of the Spanish crown from Castile to Mexico to Sicily. In their itinerant careers, they carried fragments of a religious dialogue between center and periphery. They were a conduit between the theories and proclamations of Catholic reform and the heterodoxy often found in the towns and villages of the Spanish world. They moved both in learned, Latinate spheres, as well as in the edges of imperial territories, where they were judges of the populace. In the vast body of revisionist scholarship on the Spanish Inquisition, historians have painstakingly, and admirably, excavated the identities of many of the Inquisition's victims. My focus on inquisitors flips the lens to study of some of history's most famous "offenders." Without thorough analysis of both sides of the inquisitorial process, I contend, the legal, religious, and political stakes of inquisitorial trials cannot be fully analyzed or appreciated. Thus, my research suggests a reconsideration of the meanings and powers of the Inquisition, in light of the individual priorities and writings of inquisitors, as crown servants and prominent members of the lettered, legal class in early modern Spain.